Ripple Co-Founder Jed McCaleb Made $3 Billion Through $XRP Sales, Estimates Suggest

Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb has sold the last of his $XRP on his “tacostand” wallet on the XRP Ledger after originally owning 9 billion tokens in 2013, when the network was created. Estimates suggest McCaleb made $3 billion through the sale of his tokens.

McCaleb is said to have started working on Ripple back in 2011, and was part of its founding team when the firm launched in 2013. While he left it in 2014 to work on Stellar (XLM), he was awarded 9 billion XRP tokens for his role in developing and founding OpenCoin, which was later rebranded to Ripple.

The entrepreneur received the funds on a fixed schedule and has made it clear via XRP Talk, a forum for XRP investors and proponents, that he was selling the funds as he received them. McCaleb donated part of the funds to charities such as Give Directly, Literacy Bridge, and others.

Ripple confirmed McCaleb has sold the last of his XRP tokens in a blog post titled “The Stand is Finally Out of Tacos,” in reference to McCaleb’s “tacostand” wallet name. The post details that months after Ripple was created, McCaleb’s vision did not alogin with that of Ripple, leading to his exit in 2013.

The post links to an answer from Ripple’s CTO to a user on Quora, noting that Jed “tried to dump his XRP quickly and Ripple acted to stop him through a series of lawsuits.” In response, McCaleb called the lawsuits “frivolous.”

McCaleb’s XRP sales were believed by some of the cryptocurrency’s proponents to be keeping its price down, as constant selling pressure was added every time McCaleb sold his tokens.

Ripple’s blog post details that developers and entrepreneurs independent from Ripple have kept on building on top of the XRP Ledger, which now “supports hundreds of use cases from cross-border payments and custody to marketplaces and NFTs.”

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Featured image via Pixabay